Joining the Majority

From the eulogy my dear friend Joey and his sisters wrote for their father, Edwin, who died on May 19th.

My father liked to say that dead is dead  and disliked intensely all of the euphemisms that we use to describe death. Save one: he had a fondness for a particularly evocative Victorian expression. Rather than pass away or left us, Victorians said that a person had joined the majority. This suited my father because it was both true and literary.